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Posts Tagged ‘obama’

Michigan surge for Romney

Posted by Richard on November 1, 2012

Detroit News columnist Nolan Finley:

If the polls are right and Michigan really is suddenly in play in the presidential race, it’s a very, very bad sign for President Obama’s re-election hopes.

The Detroit News WDIV-Channel 4 poll this week placed Mitt Romney at just 2.7 points behind Obama, well within the margin of error and erasing a lead for the president that had been as high as 14 points after the Democratic National Convention.

The narrowing of the race in a state that Obama won by 16 points in 2008 bodes ill for the president nationally. Michigan was never expected to be this competitive.

While both campaigns have had the state on the watch list and continued nominal spending on ads, Romney hasn’t been here since August and Obama since April.

And why would they come here? Michigan hasn’t voted for a Republican presidential candidate since 1988.

But if history is wrong and Obama is indeed on the verge of losing a state so reliably blue it may well portend a nationwide collapse.

I’m not religious, but when I read that the phrase “From your lips to God’s ear” popped into my head.

UPDATE: I just checked Rasmussen Reports (one of the most accurate polling firms in the last several elections), and they have these recent swing state poll results:

Dick Morris argues that any state in which the sitting president can do no better than a tie this close to the election will go to the challenger, because most of the undecideds will swing to the challenger. From his lips to God’s ear. 🙂

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Benghazi-gate updates

Posted by Richard on November 1, 2012

Yesterday, Walid Shoebat reported that one of a “treasure trove of documents” obtained from a source in Libya indicates that the interim government put an al Qaeda ally in charge of security in Tripoli, including all embassies, apparently with US approval.

UPDATE: In case you’re wondering — yes, the al Qaeda ally, Abdel Hakim Belhaj (or Belhadj), that this document says was in charge of our embassy’s security is the same former associate of Osama bin Laden and former fighter in Afghanistan whom I posted about on October 2. It was his jihadist militia that the US armed during the Libyan non-war, it may have been his jihadist militia that attacked the consulate, and it may have been those US-supplied weapons that were used in the attack.

This morning, Fox News reported on a secret August 16 cable leaked to them. Almost a month before the 9/11 terrorist attack on the Benghazi consulate, the cable  notified the Secretary of State’s office about an emergency meeting called by the US mission in Benghazi. The cable reported that the city was home to about ten Islamist militias and al Qaeda training camps, that the Libyan government had no control over the region, and that the consulate was in danger:

“RSO (Regional Security Officer) expressed concerns with the ability to defend Post in the event of a coordinated attack due to limited manpower, security measures, weapons capabilities, host nation support, and the overall size of the compound,” the cable said.

The details in the cable seemed to foreshadow the deadly Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. compound, which was a coordinated, commando-style assault using direct and indirect fire. Al Qaeda in North Africa and Ansar al-Sharia, both mentioned in the cable, have since been implicated in the consulate attack.

In addition to describing the security situation in Benghazi as “trending negatively,” the cable said explicitly that the mission would ask for more help. “In light of the uncertain security environment, US Mission Benghazi will submit specific requests to US Embassy Tripoli for additional physical security upgrades and staffing needs by separate cover.”

In an outstanding, must-read editorial today, the Las Vegas Review-Journal declared Obama an “unworthy commander in chief.” Here’s a portion, which outlines much of what we know about events in Benghazi and Washington on 9/11 (emphasis added):

 U.S. Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens and three other Americans died in a well-planned military assault on their diplomatic mission in Benghazi seven weeks ago, the anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. So why are details surfacing, piecemeal, only now?

The Obama administration sat by doing nothing for seven hours that night, ignoring calls to dispatch help from our bases in Italy, less than two hours away. It has spent the past seven weeks stretching the story out, engaging in misdirection and deception involving supposed indigenous outrage over an obscure anti-Muslim video, confident that with the aid of a docile press corps this infamous climax to four years of misguided foreign policy can be swept under the rug, at least until after Tuesday’s election.

Charles Woods, father of former Navy SEAL and Henderson resident Tyrone Woods, 41, says his son died slumped over his machine gun after he and fellow ex-SEAL Glen Doherty – not the two locals who were the only bodyguards Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the Obama administration would authorize – held off the enemy for seven hours.

The Obama administration was warned. They received an embassy cable June 25 expressing concern over rising Islamic extremism in Benghazi, noting the black flag of al-Qaida “has been spotted several times flying over government buildings and training facilities.” The Obama administration removed a well-armed, 16-member security detail from Libya in August, The Wall Street Journal reported last month, replacing it with a couple of locals. Mr. Stevens sent a cable Aug. 2 requesting 11 additional body guards, noting “Host nation security support is lacking and cannot be depended on,” reports Peter Ferrara at Forbes.com. But these requests were denied, officials testified before the House Oversight Committee earlier this month.

Based on documents released by the committee, on the day of the attack the Pentagon dispatched a drone with a video camera so everyone in Washington could see what was happening in real time. The drone documented no crowds protesting any video. But around 4 p.m. Washington received an email from the Benghazi mission saying it was under a military-style attack. The White House, the Pentagon, the State Department and the CIA were able to watch the live video feed. An email sent later that day reported “Ansar al-Sharia claims responsibility for Benghazi attack.”

Not only did the White House do nothing, there are now reports that a counterterrorism team ready to launch a rescue mission was ordered to stand down.

The official explanation for the inadequate security? This administration didn’t want to “offend the sensibilities” of the new radical Islamic regime which American and British arms had so recently helped install in Libya.

The official explanation for why Obama administration officials watched the attack unfold for seven hours, refusing repeated requests to send the air support and relief forces that sat less than two hours away in Italy? Silence.

If this were a Republican administration, ABC, CBS, and NBC would each have aired at least one hour-long primetime special report on Benghazi-gate by now, and the cable news networks would all be reporting on it 24/7. The New York Times, Washington Post, and numerous other papers would have published countless editorials expressing outrage over the mishandling of the Benghazi situation and even more outrage over the subsequent cover-up. The Democrats would be helping keep the story in the news by calling back to Washington all the congresscritters from safe districts, empaneling a special committeee, and holding Benghazi-gate hearings non-stop, with subpoenas for the Secretary of State, White House chief of staff, head of the CIA, and a score of other administration officials.

But this isn’t a Republican administration. And the mainstream media aren’t just “a docile press corps,” as the Review-Journal politely puts it — they’re accomplices in the cover-up and an active arm of the Obama re-election campaign.

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The key sign that Romney’s winning

Posted by Richard on October 31, 2012

Forget the polls. Yeah, they show that things are trending Romney’s way in state after state. But here’s the real key sign that things are going Romney’s way: David Letterman’s Top Ten List.

Letterman has been carrying on like a trouper during Sandy, doing his show last night and tonight with no studio audience. Tonight, he did a Top Ten List of unnecessary 911 calls received during the storm.

The number one unnecessary 911 call: “I’m losing to a guy named Mitt.”

[rimshot]

You know the Obama campaign is in trouble when a confirmed lefty like Letterman is making jokes about how he’s losing.

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Obama’s 2nd term agenda: a “pathetic picture book”

Posted by Richard on October 26, 2012

Rich Lowry at Politico:

As an artifact of the diminishment of President Barack Obama, it is hard to top his newly released pamphlet, “A Plan for Jobs & Middle-Class Security.”

The plan purports, first, to be a plan, and second, to outline a second-term agenda distinct from his first-term agenda. It fails on both counts. It cobbles together his current policies with some ill-defined new bullet points to barely cover 20 pages largely devoted to nice pictures of the president.

Why would the president wait until 14 days before the election, after the conventions and the debates, to release his plan? And then print 3.5 million copies of it, making the plan a publishing phenomenon to rival “Dreams from My Father”?

It’s the panicked realization that his campaign’s attempted destruction of Mitt Romney hasn’t worked and isn’t enough to win. The NBC/Wall Street Journal poll this week found that 62 percent of people want major changes in a prospective Obama second term. Four percent — that’s almost down to Obama administration officials and immediate family — want more of the same.

So the president needed someone to get on QuarkXPress to paste together “a new plan” and then run down to FedEx Kinko’s — pronto. But he couldn’t hit print during debate season, lest he give his opponent another target. Surely Romney would have loved to cite the risible document as Exhibit A for Obama’s status-quo presidency.

Read the whole thing. As I suggested earlier, Obama’s second-term plan is “Stay the course, stay the course.”

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Stunning Benghazi revelations

Posted by Richard on October 26, 2012

Fox News has a shocking story about the attacks in Benghazi on the US consulate and the CIA “annex” (safe house) to which consulate personnel were evacuated. During the seven hours of fighting, repeated requests for air support and other help were turned down:

Former Navy SEAL Tyrone Woods was part of a small team who was at the CIA annex about a mile from the U.S. consulate where Ambassador Chris Stevens and his team came under attack. When he and others heard the shots fired, they … requested permission to go to the consulate and help out. They were told to “stand down,” according to sources familiar with the exchange. Soon after, they were again told to “stand down.”

Woods and at least two others ignored those orders and made their way to the consulate which at that point was on fire. Shots were exchanged. The rescue team from the CIA annex evacuated those who remained at the consulate and Sean Smith, who had been killed in the initial attack. They could not find the ambassador and returned to the CIA annex at about midnight.

At that point, they called again for military support and help because they were taking fire at the CIA safe house, or annex. The request was denied. There were no communications problems at the annex, according those present at the compound. The team was in constant radio contact with their headquarters. In fact, at least one member of the team was on the roof of the annex manning a heavy machine gun when mortars were fired at the CIA compound. The security officer had a laser on the target that was firing and repeatedly requested back-up support from a Spectre gunship, which is commonly used by U.S. Special Operations forces to provide support to Special Operations teams on the ground involved in intense firefights. The fighting at the CIA annex went on for more than four hours — enough time for any planes based in Sigonella Air base, just 480 miles away, to arrive. Fox News has also learned that two separate Tier One Special operations forces were told to wait, among them Delta Force operators.

Earlier reports revealed that during the attack the State Department was in direct communication with the consulate staff (who reported being under mortar fire and pleaded for help), that at least initially there was real-time video from the consulate security cameras, and that there was real-time video from a drone over the area. Now we learn that there was “constant radio contact” between the CIA safe house and CIA headquarters. And that air support and special operations forces were only an hour or two away, but not deployed.

What possible explanation could there be for such a shameful failure to take any action whatsoever in defense of an American ambassador and his staff?

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta told reporters at the Pentagon on Thursday that there was not a clear enough picture of what was occurring on the ground in Benghazi to send help.

And then there’s this (emphasis added):

They also say they needed permission from the Libyan government to enter the country’s airspace, though West, the former deputy defense secretary, dismissed such an argument.

Unbelievable. Unbe-frickin-lievable.

In response to all the dissembling and misinformation coming out of the Obama administration, Charles Woods, the father of Tyrone Woods, has spoken out:

“I want to honor my son, Ty Woods, who responded to the cries for help and voluntarily sacrificed his life to protect the lives of other Americans. In the last few days it has become public knowledge that within minutes of the first bullet being fired the White House knew these heroes would be slaughtered if immediate air support was denied. Apparently, C-130s were ready to respond immediately. In less than an hour, the perimeters could have been secured and American lives could have been saved. After seven hours fighting numerically superior forces, my son’s life was sacrificed because of the White House’s decision. This has nothing to do with politics, this has to do with integrity and honor. My son was a true American hero. We need more heroes today. My son showed moral courage. This is an opportunity for the person or persons who made the decision to sacrifice my son’s life to stand up.”

Woods reported disturbing details of his meeting with the President, Vice President Biden, and Secretary of State Clinton at Andrews Air Force Base upon the return of his son’s body (emphasis in original):

Woods said Biden came over to his family and asked in a “loud and boisterous” voice, “Did your son always have balls the size of cue balls?”

The grieving father also described his brief encounter with President Obama during the ceremony for the Libya victims.

“When he finally came over to where we were, I could tell that he was rather conflicted, a person who was not at peace with himself,” Woods said. “Shaking hands with him, quite frankly, was like shaking hands with a dead fish. His face was pointed towards me but he would not look me in the eye, his eyes were over my shoulder.”

Hillary Clinton’s comments to Woods raise even more questions about the White House’s official story on the Benghazi attack, which has already been extremely inconsistent.

After apologizing for his loss, Woods said Clinton told him that the U.S. would “make sure that the person who made that film is arrested and prosecuted.

Obviously, Clinton was referring to the anti-Muslim YouTube video that the Obama administration spent nearly two weeks blaming for the attack. White House Press Secretary Jay Carney, U.S. Ambassador Susan Rice, Clinton and the president himself all blamed the video at various points. Beck pointed out that the White House is now trying to claim that it has always considered terrorism as the cause of the attack.

If this were a Republican administration, every mainstream media outlet in the country would have been screaming “coverup,” “gross incompetence,” and “shameful behavior” for days on end by now.

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Missed opportunities, part 2

Posted by Richard on October 22, 2012

OK, one more missed opportunity. Earlier this month, the chief imam of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, Supreme Guide Mohammed Badie, called on Muslims worldwide to wage jihad against Israel and liberate Jerusalem. The Simon Wiesenthal Center denounced Badie and called on the Obama administration to distance itself from the Muslim Brotherhood.

Earlier today, responding to Egyptian President Morsi’s apparent endorsement of a “destroy the Jews” prayer, the Wiesenthal Center reiterated its call for the Obama administration to act:

The Simon Wiesenthal Center on Monday reiterated its call to US President Barack Obama to sever ties with the Muslim Brotherhood after Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi attended a prayer service during which an Islamic cleric called for the Jews to be destroyed.

According to the Center, Egypt’s Channel 1 broadcast cleric Futouh Abd Al-Nabi Mansour’s sermon in which he prayed: “Oh Allah, destroy the Jews and their supporters. Oh Allah, disperse them, rend them as under. Oh Allah, demonstrate Your might and greatness upon them.”

Romney should have brought up the Wiesenthal Center’s demand and asked Obama point-blank, “Have you responded in any way to the Wiesenthal Center’s demands? Will you suspend aid to Egypt and support for its Muslim Brotherhood government until that government renounces the views of Mohammed Badie and Futouh Abd Al-Nabi Mansour, acknowledges the right of Israel to exist, and reaffirms its commitment to the peace treaty with Israel? Because if I were President today, that’s what I would do.”

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Missed opportunities

Posted by Richard on October 22, 2012

Romney lost the foreign policy debate because of missed opportunities. According to Romney campaign spokespeople, it was a calculated strategy to “go big,” focusing on overarching themes instead of challenging the President on specifics. That’s why Romney basically gave Obama a pass on Libya. I think that was a mistake.

I think there were a number of other specifics where Obama simply stated falsehoods and Romney failed to challenge him or did so rather softly. I want to keep this brief, so I just want to mention one of them.

During one of Romney’s tougher attacks, when he listed several Obama failures or errors in foreign policy, he mentioned the Green Revolution in Iran and the Obama administration’s lack of support for the people in the streets of Tehran. Obama rebutted that, claiming that the US stood with the pro-democracy demonstrators. Balderdash. And Romney should have called him on it.

People have forgotten that the Green Revolution began as protests against a fraudulent, stolen election. In the weeks leading up to it, opposition candidates were locked up. Their rallies were broken up and their supporters attacked by Revolutionary Guards. And there was compelling evidence of systematic vote fraud in the election itself.

I remember seeing video of demonstrators carrying “America Help Us” signs and hearing pro-democracy demonstrators plead for the US to speak out on their behalf. Contrary to his claim tonight, Obama didn’t do so. Instead, the Obama administration explicitly stated that it recognized the election as legitimate and the government of Iran as legitimate. It was shameful, and Romney should have said so.

The Romney strategy seems to have been to simply appear presidential and pass the “commander-in-chief test,” relying on his advantage on economic issues to win the election. That strategy will probably work. But I’d like to have seen a more robust challenge of the Obama foreign policy record and the numerous Obama falsehoods uttered during the debate.

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The debate moment that evoked a strange memory

Posted by Richard on October 16, 2012

OK, I admit the adult beverages are starting to kick in (I can’t watch a debate without adult beverages — call it the Vodkapundit syndrome). I’ve been watching post-debate analyses on two networks (CBS and Fox News). There seems to be a consensus that one of the most significant questions was from the black guy who said to the President (paraphrasing), “I voted for you in 2008. But things aren’t going so well and I’m having a tough time. Why should I vote for you again?”

The talking heads, right and left, seemed to agree that Romney’s response was one of his best moments, and I think so too. But I was more interested in the President’s answer, which was basically (paraphrasing), “I know things are still tough, but we’re working on it. And it’s getting better. And we’re going to keep on doing what we’re doing. And believe me, things will get better still in the next four years.”

I suddenly had this memory come into my head. It was the image of George Herbert Walker Bush, gesturing with his right hand, Atlanta Braves tomahawk-chop-style, and repeating, “Stay the course, stay the course.”

Remember how well that worked for him?

And that reminded me of the Einstein quote: “Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

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More notable debate reaction

Posted by Richard on October 4, 2012

Nancy Pelosi claimed Obama won the debate. No, really. She said it with a straight face. A very Botoxed, practically immobile, straight face.

Al Gore blamed the altitude for Obama’s poor performance. No, really. He said it with a straight face. His usual, no Botox needed, straight face.

Chris Matthews “freaked out” and argued that Obama’s problem is he doesn’t watch enough MSNBC. No, really. He said it with his usual freaked-out face.

Rush Limbaugh said Obama “came off even worse in his debate with Romney last night than he did in his debate with Clint Eastwood.”

Jimmy Kimmel said the only thing that could have saved Obama is if the body of Osama bin Laden had dropped from the ceiling.
<rimshot>

My theory on Obama’s poor performance: He practiced for the debate with John Kerry. So he was fully prepared to debate someone like John Kerry.
<rimshot>

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Debate: Romney won, Obama lost, and I’m ambivalent

Posted by Richard on October 3, 2012

You know it was a bad night for the President when Bill Maher, who recently gave the Obama campaign $1 million, tweets stuff like this:

@billmaher i can’t believe i’m saying this, but Obama looks like he DOES need a teleprompter
@billmaher Obama made a lot of great points tonight. Unfortunately, most of them were for Romney
@billmaher Looks like my pre-thought about Romney knocking it out of the park was accurate, or so says the media that’s so in the tank for Obama

The media consensus, from Fox News to CBS News and CNN, is that tonight’s debate was a huge win for Romney and that the President had a lackluster, disappointing evening. CNN’s post-debate poll showed 67% thought Romney won. CBS had 400 independents watch the debate, and then polled them afterward. Overwhelmingly, they thought Romney won. Before the debate, 30% of them thought Romney could relate to the average person’s problems. Afterward, it was 62%.

Personally, I see the glass as both half-full and half-empty. As a libertarian, listening to a lot of what Romney said in the way of specifics was painful. “I’m not against regulations, I love regulations! Except for a few bad ones, and the ones that aren’t concrete and specific enough.” (I’m paraphrasing.)

On the other hand, when I focus on the larger statements of principle and vision of the two, it’s clear that there’s a huge difference between them. Not because Romney is so good in that regard (he’s only OK), but because Obama is so bad.

Obama doubled down on Bigger and Bigger Government. Lots of blather about the need for more government “investments.” This statement in particular struck me: “I want to hire another 100,000 new math and science teachers” — not “I want to make it possible” or “I want to help school districts,” but “I want to hire” — as if we have a single national school district and he’s the chairman of the board.

If this man gets another four years, he’ll destroy what’s left of the founding principles of this country (not least by appointing three or four new Supreme Court justices who share his socialist/authoritarian view of government).

My ambivalence is strictly about what I heard in the debate, not about how to vote. Mitt Romney may or may not move us significantly in the right direction, but he won’t move us in the wrong direction. Obama will accelerate us with all his might in the wrong direction. We simply can’t afford — fiscally or philosophically — another Obama term. So I’m glad Romney won the debate. I’m certainly hoping he wins the election, and unless the outcome in Colorado is not in doubt (and I can vote Libertarian without risking negative consequences), I’ll certainly be voting for Romney.

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Was our consulate attacked with our own weapons?

Posted by Richard on October 2, 2012

In 2011, President Obama ordered the Libyan rebels to be supplied with arms, including anti-tank rockets and mortars. The Saudis were apparently persuaded to act as go-betweens, actually delivering the US-supplied weapons. This was done even though the Obama administration must have known that many of those rebels, including their commander Abdel Hakim Belhadj, were radical Islamist jihadis with ties to al Qaeda (emphasis added):

… Through the 1990s, as leader of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, Belhadj fought Qadhafi’s forces, plotting twice to assassinate him. When it got too hot in Libya, he moved to Sudan, working with al-Qaeda as a guest of Osama bin Laden and then returned to Afghanistan in 1998. He spent the next few years in Jalalabad, directing funds and arms for al-Qaeda training camps before he was arrested by the CIA and MI-6 in 2002. Belhadj was then, according to a lawsuit he filed against the British government, tortured brutally before being bundled on to a plane along with his pregnant wife and handed over to Qadhafi. Eventually, as part of Saif al-Islam Gaddafi’s “de-radicalisation” programme, Belhadj and other associates were freed in 2010. Within a year, he had become the commander of the Transitional National Council (TNC) rebel force.

That the U.S. cooperated with Belhadj and others like him to oust Qadhafi speaks volumes either of its broad-mindedness or its naiveté. Even as the British, French and U.S. intelligence services armed the rebels, they turned a blind eye to the troubling ideological differences they had with the forces fighting Qadhafi — from links with al-Qaeda in the Maghrib, to avowals of the harsh Sharia law they planned to implement in Libya, to the human rights violations by TNC units. Of equal concern should have been the domination of different parts of post-Qadhafi Libya by lawless militias answerable to none.

Instead, NATO leaders proclaimed themselves satisfied that the ends in Libya had been met, a brutal dictator was finished, and that was that. Until a year later, when heavily armed men launched a deadly assault on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi.

Shades of “Fast and Furious.” Was  the US consulate attacked, and Ambassador Stevens and three other Americans killed, by al-Qaeda-affiliated jihadis using US-supplied rockets, mortars, and small arms?

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Obama’s disturbing UN speech

Posted by Richard on September 29, 2012

I finally got around to checking out the President’s address to the UN General Assembly. Although there were some good phrases, the general “can’t we all just get along” tone left me cold.

So did his reiterated denunciation of that “crude and disgusting video” and the tepid defense of the First Amendment that followed, which made it sound like the difference between those who protect free speech and those who suppress it is merely a matter of taste, a preference that, understandably, not everyone shares  (“I know that not all countries in this body share this understanding of the protection of free speech”).

And I found this bit quite disturbing (emphasis added):

The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam. Yet to be credible, those who condemn that slander must also condemn the hate we see when the image of Jesus Christ is desecrated, churches are destroyed, or the Holocaust is denied. Let us condemn incitement against Sufi Muslims, and Shiite pilgrims. It is time to heed the words of Gandhi: “Intolerance is itself a form of violence and an obstacle to the growth of a true democratic spirit.” …

Does Obama (or his speech writer) really not understand the meaning of those words to much of the Muslim world? To a devout, fundamentalist Muslim, you slander Muhammad if you deny that he was a prophet, a messenger of God, and that the words he spoke are the words of God. To much of the Muslim world, the President might as well have said, “The future must not belong to those who reject Islam.”

Obama then engaged his favorite rhetorical device, dialectic. We must also condemn the desecration of Jesus? He and his Socialist Democrats have aggressively defended taxpayer funding, via the National Endowment for the Arts, of “Piss Christ” and a dung-covered Mary, among others. It’s the people who dared to condemn such works of “art” (without, I might add, any rioting, burning, or killing) and who opposed federal funding of them whom Obama and his cohort have condemned.

Intolerance is a form of violence? By embracing that absurd statement, he negated his earlier defense (such as it was) of free speech and threw overboard the First Amendment. And he posited a moral equivalence between those who criticize 7th-century barbarians and those barbarians, who raped and murdered a US ambassador, call for the extermination of Jews, subjugate women, keep slaves, and execute homosexuals.

All in all, a sorry performance by the President of the United States and purported leader of the free world. Rep. Mike Coffman was correct when he said of Obama that “in his heart, he’s not an American.” His leftist ethics and post-modernist epistemology make him at best a reluctant defender of the values that created and sustained this country, and at worst an apologist for and underminer of those values.

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Mocking Mormons vs. mocking Muslims

Posted by Richard on September 20, 2012

Hillary Clinton denounced a laughably amateurish little YouTube video mocking Islam as “disgusting and reprehensible,” and it’s been repeatedly condemned by the Obama administration and all good liberals. But liberals’ condemnations of the mocking of religion are highly selective, as the Wall Street Journal’s Bret Stephens pointed out:

‘Hasa Diga Eebowai” is the hit number in Broadway’s hit musical “The Book of Mormon,” which won nine Tony awards last year. What does the phrase mean? I can’t tell you, because it’s unprintable in a family newspaper.

On the other hand, if you can afford to shell out several hundred bucks for a seat, then you can watch a Mormon missionary get his holy book stuffed—well, I can’t tell you about that, either. Let’s just say it has New York City audiences roaring with laughter.

The “Book of Mormon”—a performance of which Hillary Clinton attended last year, without registering a complaint—comes to mind as the administration falls over itself denouncing “Innocence of Muslims.” This is a film that may or may not exist; whose makers are likely not who they say they are; whose actors claim to have known neither the plot nor purpose of the film; and which has never been seen by any member of the public except as a video clip on the Internet.

No matter. The film, the administration says, is “hateful and offensive” (Susan Rice), “reprehensible and disgusting” (Jay Carney) and, in a twist, “disgusting and reprehensible” (Hillary Clinton). Mr. Carney, the White House spokesman, also lays sole blame on the film for inciting the riots that have swept the Muslim world and claimed the lives of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three of his staff in Libya.

So let’s get this straight: In the consensus view of modern American liberalism, it is hilarious to mock Mormons and Mormonism but outrageous to mock Muslims and Islam. Why? Maybe it’s because nobody has ever been harmed, much less killed, making fun of Mormons.

Read the whole thing.

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Boxer and other leftist Obama shills try to silence Netanyahu

Posted by Richard on September 13, 2012

Barbara Boxer, the genius of the Senate who once said of the San Francisco earthquake, “those who died, their lives will never be the same again,” and of Obamacare, “I don’t want to go back to the days when thousands of people died every day because they had no insurance,” wrote an open letter to Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu chastising him for supposedly trying to influence the US election by speaking bluntly about the Iranian threat and America’s inept approach to it. This is an astonishing and I believe unprecedented foray into pursuit of a private foreign policy by a member of the US Congress.

But Boxer’s attempt to silence Bibi has been joined by other Obama surrogates and media lapdogs like Time’s Joel Klein, The New Yorker’s David Remnick, and former ambassador Dan Kurzer.

It apparently hasn’t occurred to Boxer and the rest of these clowns that Netanyahu might be just a little bit more interested in preventing the nuclear annihilation of Israel than the US election. Commentary’s Seth Mandel sets them straight.

I suspect that the anti-Netanyahu frenzy among the American left is a reaction to this:

What’s even more telling in the TIPP poll, are the inroads Mitt Romney is making, gaining support among Jewish voters. A breakdown of religion along with other demographic groups shows President Obama maintaining a lead among Jews but by a smaller margin – 59 to 35 percent for Mitt Romney, with six percent undecided. While that is still a majority it is a dramatic decline from the 78 percent of the Jewish vote he got in 2008.

 

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First lady is clueless about national security, too

Posted by Richard on September 13, 2012

New York banned large soft drinks today as part of what the AP calls the “war on obesity.” First Lady Michelle Obama is totally on board. On today’s Dr. Oz show, she reiterated her contention that obesity is our nation’s biggest national security threat.

You know, that statement was just plain stupid when she first said it in 2010. Two days after al Qaeda-orchestrated attacks on our consulate in Benghazi and our embassy in Cairo, the deaths of four Americans, including our ambassador to Libya, and while al Qaeda-inspired mobs are threatening US embassies and citizens throughout the Muslim world, such a statement is not just stupid, it’s offensive. And insane.

Ms. Obama, why don’t you ask the families of J. Christopher Stevens, Sean Smith, Glen Doherty, and Tyrone Woods if they think obesity is our nation’s biggest national security threat?

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